Dr. Chuck Pettinger: Fueling a Safety Conversation

Last Summit, Dr. Chuck Pettinger (Predictive Solutions) devoted a pre-conference workshop and presentation to educating attendees on how they could better analyze their safety data and “look for the signals from the noise,” so that data could add value to their overall safety initiatives.

A self-proclaimed “research geek,” Chuck says his initiation into the behavioral safety field began while attending graduate school at Virginia Tech, under the guidance of Dr. E. Scott Geller. Chuck says his passion for analyzing data and looking for trends continued throughout school, eventually guiding his career further into the world of Behavioral Based Safety (BBS) data.

“When I worked with Scott, I helped design our BBS tracking tool. When I took my present job at Predictive Solutions, I got to play with millions of data points. Your BBS data tells a story…sometimes good, sometimes bad. Sometimes we are so biased, we can’t even see the story that our data is telling us!”

Chuck’s career now is based on gathering information from safety audits and inspections, and then making predictions. Chuck takes the gathered data and inserts it into predictive models, including perceptions of safety culture, and uses the results to create a “safety temperature,” or checkpoint, in order to identify real-time cultural concerns and issues in large organizations. Most importantly, Chuck uses this information to work with leaders with the goal fueling a better safety conversation, instead of simply communicating safety information.

Chuck and his colleagues are beginning work with Appalachian State’s very own Dr. Shawn Bergman (speaking at this year’s Summit) to fund graduate student work and begin publishing scholarly and trade articles showing the efficacy of data analytics applied to Safety.